Background: Oral comprehension difficulties are prevalent in preschool children with language difficulties and are frequently the target of speech and language therapy (SLT) intervention. To support the implementation of research to practice, there is a need to identify effective interventions for this population and to describe their components.…

Background: The abbreviated version of the Token Test (aTT) is widely used to assess language comprehension deficits in stroke patients (SPs). However, aTT has not been validated for Latin American Spanish speakers, so clinicians tend to use cut-off scores for aTT validated in developed countries. Aims: To provide normative data for the Spanish…

Background: Intelligibility and comprehensibility in speech disorders can be assessed both perceptually and instrumentally, but a lack of consensus exists regarding the terminology and related speech measures in both the clinical and scientific fields. Aims: To draw up a more consensual definition of intelligibility and comprehensibility and to…

Background: Despite increasing knowledge of social communication skills of autistic people, the interrelatedness of different skills such as non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills is not much known about. A better understanding of the complex interplay between different domains of social communication helps us to…

Background: People with communication disability following stroke are at risk of falls during inpatient rehabilitation. However, they are often excluded from hospital falls research, and little is known about the circumstances or outcomes of their falls to inform risk management strategies. Aims: To examine hospital medical records and incident…

Background: Individuals with affective-prosodic deficits have difficulty understanding or expressing emotions and attitudes through prosody. Affective prosody disorders can occur in multiple neurological conditions, but the limited knowledge about the clinical groups prone to deficits complicates their identification in clinical settings.…

Background: People with communication problems experience challenges in participation. Optimizing communicative participation for this population is an important outcome of speech and language therapy. Participation experiences are best assessed from the patient's perspective, using a patient-reported outcome measure (PROM). The Communicative…

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI), especially to the right hemisphere, can result in difficulty using or understanding prosodic contours in speech. Prosody is used to convey emotional connotation or linguistic intent and includes pitch, loudness, rate, and voice quality. A disorder in the comprehension or production of prosody is known as…

Background: Function words, and more specifically prepositions and prepositional locutions, are considered to be one of the most important difficulties for children with DLD. Aims: To examine the capacity of bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to comprehend different Spanish prepositions and prepositional locutions in a…

Background: Successful communication is vital to quality of life. One group commonly facing speech and communication difficulties is individuals with intellectual disability (ID). A novel route to encourage clear speech is offered by mainstream smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Alexa and Google Home). Smart speakers offer four factors important for…

Background: The comprehension profile of people with agrammatism is a debated topic. Syntactic complexity and cognitive resources, in particular phonological short-term memory (pSTM), are considered as crucial components by different interpretative accounts. Aim: To investigate the interaction of syntactic complexity and of pSTM in sentence…

Background: Little is known about story retelling and comprehension abilities in groups with lower levels of education and socio-economic status (SES). A growing body of evidence suggests the role of an extended network supporting narrative comprehension, but few studies have been conducted in clinical populations, even less in developing…

Background: Speech intelligibility is a global indicator of the severity of a speech problem. It is a measure that has been used frequently in research and clinical assessment of speech. Previous studies have shown that factors, such as measurement method and listener experience, can influence speech intelligibility scores. However, these factors…

Background: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) was traditionally described as a disease restricted to the motor system. However, recent findings suggested that it also affects cognition, especially executive functions, social cognition, language and pragmatics. A relevant issue in current research is thus the description of the cognitive…

Background: There is a clear predominance of programmes aimed at improving aspects related to language production in pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, programmes aimed at improving their receptive skills are limited. Aims: The main aim was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention programme for oral language…